0.2 The great war (part i)  (Page 10/14)

Robert Prager, a German-born American refused to sign the Pledge. One evening members of the local “Council of Defense” (an ultrapatriotic group self-tasked with routing out all anti-American, as they defined anti-American, Americans) knocked on his front door. They gave him one final chance to sign the Pledge. When Prager refused someone in the crowd shouted “Get the rope!” According to Prager, “The first I knew was when the rope was about my neck and around my body under my arms.” He escaped being lynched.

Women also joined in the preparation efforts. Women took jobs in US weapons factories (a precursor of things to come in the 1940s), they sold Liberty Bonds at church, school, and social functions; they led clothing drives for soldiers and immigrants; they ran canteens for American service men in England, and over 10,000 American women volunteered as Red Cross nurses in France. Women’s organizations put their work on the back burner in order to help in the total war effort. For example, the National American Women’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA) sponsored mobile field hospitals in France and England and urged their female workers and supporters to go to western Europe to staff those hospitals. NAWSA leaders were even concerned that Jeannette Rankin’s “no” vote would cast a pall on the organization because Rankin was a well-know member as well as an activist in the NAWSA. Yet, these were volunteer organizations and thus were not mandated by the federal government.

The Draft

Congress reluctantly passed the Selective Service Act on May 15 ^th , 1917. Also known as the draft, this Act required all men between the ages of 18 and 30 to register with the federal government. The federal government also advertised. One poster, from the Tank Corps Recruiting Office in Washington, DC, took a rather tongue-in-cheek approach to attracting the attention of patriotic men:

Wanted: Husky Young Americans, College or University Training Desirable, Though Not Essential to Tour to Berlin Via France and No Man's Land ... :

Join the Tanks.

“Hello Girls”

The federal government needed thousands of people to work directly for the US Army in the Signal Corps or as civilian telephone operators presumably women to free up civilian male operators to enter the ranks of the Signal Corps. “Amateur wireless operators, women typists, and all other young men and women possessing the fundamentals of grammar and high school education” were urged to heed the call of the War Department. Western Union, the largest US telegraph company, was training 2,500 people to meet the domestic needs of the communication giant in order for the company’s more seasoned operators to join the war effort in early May of 1917.

There were two jobs for women eager to serve in uniform: nurses and in the Signal Corps. Male members of the Signal Corps were stationed in the trenches, while female members performed communications duties primarily for the various US military headquarters in France such as the First Army, located in Verdun. Technically, women were not full members of the military and although they sported rank on their shoulders, they were not considered veterans. Not unlike women during other wars, the federal government was slow to recognize their work as sufficiently critical to the overall mission as to qualify these women as veterans. The US government did not bestow veteran status on the women of the US Army Signal Corps until towards the end of the Carter administration. To those who relied on their bravery, patriotism, and courage, the women of the US Army Signal Corps were known as “Hello Girls.”